This kitchen simulator is the perfect addition to your local multiplayer roster
By Lauren Kelly, Graphics Manager
5/5
Ever wanted to team up with your friends to cut, cook, and plate orders in a restaurant where the floor is made of ice? Overcooked is a four-player local multiplayer game where you and your friends work together to get as many dishes complete as possible within the game’s time limit. This will involve your various teammates taking the lead and barking orders, starting kitchen fires, getting all the wrong ingredients, and falling out of the various kitchens with fully-plated meals. It’s stressful, but it’s also incredibly fun.
The game’s overworld is a map not dissimilar to old-school Mario games, where you follow a path to the various levels, which unlock one at a time. There are even different areas that you can only unlock after getting a certain number of stars, with a maximum of three stars obtainable per level. Some of the kitchens I’ve worked in in Overcooked have included two moving trucks that meet up occasionally in the middle for you to pass ingredients and plates across, a volcano with randomly dropping platforms and white bullets passing through the centre, and the aforementioned floating chunk of ice, where you serve fish and chips to penguins. As you can see, it escalates quickly from the run-of-the-mill kitchen of the first few levels. To keep it even more interesting, the players get to choose from a wide variety of chef characters, including humans of many races, a cat, a raccoon in a wheelchair, a dinosaur, and a robot.
I have spent a lot of time playing this with various friends, trying to three star every level we come to and often failing to do so for many tries, and it somehow doesn’t get old. There is also a versus mode, where you and a partner can face off against two other friends to serve the most dishes, but I will admit I’ve yet to play it, since we haven’t tired of the four-player. I have to imagine it’s even more hectic than when you’re all working together. However, for those of you who don’t always like playing perfectly nice, the dash button in this game lets you move quickly but also knock your teammates over, making it a good way to grief your friends. Even without that, though, this game is a challenge, and a welcome one. Between all of the tasks and the difficulty of getting everyone on the same page while dealing with the level’s unique problems, you will fail sometimes, but I’ve never felt like giving up.
The game is available on all the major gaming platforms. I’ve played it mostly on the Nintendo Switch, where you can get it for $19.99, but it is also available on Steam for $18.99 and the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One for $16.99. If you have one dedicated game partner, or a couple friends you love to couch co-op with, it’s worth it to go in together on this game. You’ll get hours of fun out of it.
